The opening of China Entertainment Group gave Jay Chou a head-on confrontation

Chapter 737 Chinese Music Weightlifting Champion
“14 songs???”

When Qian Jiang received the document Zhou Yi threw over and prepared to prepare for the new album according to the requirements, he, who was particularly sensitive to numbers, immediately noticed the unusual number of Zhou Yi's songs.

Generally speaking, a normal original studio album has 10-15 songs, but this is only in theory.

In the past, singers and record companies usually kept the number of songs in the album between 11 and 13. Firstly, it was to save money, and secondly, it was to create a gap between the album and the compilation album with more songs, so that the compilation album would appear more cost-effective - because it has more songs.

After all, the record companies that launched compilation albums in the past were simply exhausting the resources available to them.

Zhou Yi’s albums in the past generally had less than 12 songs, so how come he suddenly released one with 14 songs?

In Qianjiang's industry development over the years, once a singer with originality breaks the rules, either the album needs so many songs to express his musical personality, or he needs more songs to fill the gap.

While highlighting the big songs in the album, it is also a way to prove to fans that they are not cutting leeks.

Since you have to serve and uphold the throne, you still need a memorial archway.

Only a very few singers play 14-15 songs purely based on their mood.

But the key issue now is that Zhou Yi’s musical personality has been shaped.

The I Ching Trilogy + Jiangnan has brought his musical personality, which is the most valued in the industry, to the top.

If you want to go further, it really depends on time. It is no longer something that can be accomplished by albums alone.

Time will make Zhou Yi's Chinese music personality, which was shaped by his first four albums, become more and more brilliant - until something happens, at a time point of great political significance, and this brilliance will be transformed into real social humanity and understood by the public.

This is how Luo Dayou ascended to the altar - at a special point in time, relying on his social humanities, his criticism and reflection, and even his appeal.

Li Zongsheng has always been inferior to Luo Dayou in status and lost here, although he did not follow Luo Dayou's path.

The Book of Changes combines both - individuals, society, family, country, and war.

The difference is that Zhou Yi has not yet written songs like Luo Dayou's "Pearl of the Orient" and "Tomorrow Will Be Better", which have risen to another level. At the same time, the number of songs about reflection and criticism is far less than that of Luo Dayou.

This was caused by the special reasons of the times, and even someone as strong as Zhou Yi could not replicate it.

For example, "Pearl of the Orient" and "Tomorrow Will Be Better" were the two songs used when Hong Kong returned to China in 97. You can't let Hong Kong return again, right?

Under such circumstances, Qian Jiang, who thought that Zhou Yi's album this year was of a normal scale, immediately sensed something was wrong: something was out of the ordinary, and as his agent he must pay attention.

"What is a musical personality? That's just the industry's way of restricting itself. The general public only knows whether it sounds good or not, and whether it's pleasing to the ear or not."

Zhou Yi stretched his body lazily, smiled and gave him a reassurance: "This is a purely market-oriented album, but it has a clear and unified theme."

Unlike his previous four albums, 10 songs in this album "Hush" later became popular songs - only four of them were not popular: Fang Datong's "Singer and Model", "Love Song", "Everyone Can", and Xu Song's "Best Singer".

In terms of popular hits, this album has the most.

"Market orientation - is it because of Sony and Boardman Records?" Qian Jiang, who was a little confused at first, suddenly thought of something and asked after a moment of silence.

On July 2004, 7, the European Union officially approved the merger of Sony Music and Germany's Bodman Records, and the merger process between the two companies was officially put on the agenda.

To date, the two companies have completed all merger procedures.

Howard Stringer, chairman of Sony (USA), officially announced last week that the two parties will establish SONY BMG Music Entertainment in November, with its headquarters in New York.

From now on, the five major international record companies that have divided the global music market for many years will be reduced to four. This will be a major reshuffle for the global record industry, and the Chinese music scene will naturally not be able to stay out of it.

After the merger, Sony Boardman Records will surpass Universal and Warner to become the world's largest record company with the largest market share, with a market share of around 30%, which is a terrifying number.

You should know that Boardman is also one of the five major record giants with a long history.

I don't know how many people have cursed the European Commission's antitrust officials for accepting black money from Sony and only then approving the merger bill.

There were also changes in the positions of the merged companies. The former CEO of Boardman Records, Jorge Schmidt-Holtz, was demoted to become the chairman of the new company.

The former Sony CEO position remains unchanged and he still serves as the CEO of Sony Boardman Records.

What's even more surprising is that Zhou Yi once criticized Mr. Schmidt. Schmidt scolded him for choosing online music, and he responded by asking him to reflect on whether he had led the company well over the years and whether its performance had increased.

The old guy holds a grudge.

Now that the merger is complete, their strength has greatly increased. Although it may not look good on the surface, they will definitely demand a mad crackdown on Zhouyi's market share in private - it is not impossible to start from the Chinese region.

There are too many pirated copies in China, and there is no soil for charging for online music. As long as the operation is done properly, it may not be impossible to break a corner of Zhouyi's market myth.

After all, the current Warner Music Group is no longer the record company that was once backed by its parent company, Time Warner. It has only been independent for less than a year, and although it still has Zhouyi as its pillar of support, its overall strength is certainly far inferior to that of the merged Sony Boardman Records.

In this situation, as soon as Zhou Yi mentioned the market-oriented album, Qian Jiang immediately thought of what Zhou Yi might be worried about - not only would it be very likely to be sniped in the market, but piracy would also have to be carefully prevented, otherwise the album would be leaked all over the place before it was even released and there would be no need to sell it.

"...a little bit."

Zhou Yi nodded calmly, "But don't tell anyone that. When the time comes, just promote this as a work that attempts to save the Chinese record market."

No matter what is said or done, he still has to give a proper memorial to his ancestors, and at the same time, lay the groundwork and find an excuse for his future retirement from the music industry.

At this point, to be honest, there are very few songs that he can reproduce and compose into high-quality albums. After all, there are only a few years of booming development in the Chinese music scene after the millennium.

It's not impossible to continue to produce albums with high reputation in the industry, but if that happens, the market will be overturned -

Because if we go further down the timeline, these songs will really be ones that no one except music enthusiasts will listen to.

The album with the best popularity among the public, "Orange Moon", is his most popular one. Tao Zhe's "69 Movements", which has the worst reputation among the public, is his most artistic expression and also his personal favorite album, far surpassing "Black Tangerine";
The best albums in Jay Chou's personal career that shaped his musical personality are only his first and second albums. The more popular and commercial his subsequent albums were, the better their performance was, such as "Ye Huimei", "Qilixiang" and "Chopin in November".

Now, Zhou Yi, who has established his position in the industry with his first four albums, thinks it is time for him to transform. After all, if he doesn't transform, there will be no songs that can be reproduced. Now he has to pick and choose the remaining songs in his memory, and there are many songs that cannot be used at all.

You can't go back and sing songs like "Ten Thousand Reasons to Be Sad", "Can't Afford to Be Hurt", "Two Butterflies", "Autumn Won't Come Back", "Pray to Buddha" and so on now, that would be a real collapse of the image. The first four albums were set too high.

Coincidentally, the merger of Sony and Boardman Records provided him with a perfect reason and excuse to completely transform his business.

"Zhou Yi's fifth album was forced to go commercial, which led to the decline in album quality. It's all Sony Boardman's fault! They want to rely on market pressure to overwhelm Zhou Yi! Zhou Yi chose to take off his artistic coat for Warner's market share and fight against two major international capitals with his extraordinary personal talent!"

"Sony is guilty of a heinous crime!"

"In the winter of 2004, Zhou Yi defeated capital with his talent."

This is the subsequent marketing strategy. Zhou Yi has already arranged a number of positions for Sony, just waiting for them to jump in.

This is another reason why his album is called "Hush" even though the songs in it are all about the theme of "love" - ​​even the album cover is telling people (Sony Boardman) to shut up.

Let Sony suffer a little and bear more blame, then he will reap the benefits. From now on, we will burn incense for Sony during every festival.

Of course, this was Zhou Yi’s own explanation to Warner.

Warner’s external rhetoric is another matter, which requires Zhou Yi to describe it in a more lofty way - the term Zhou Yi chose for this is "a work that saves the market."

As we all know, the domestic physical record market completely collapsed in 2004.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that each company has 50 or 70 newspapers, and holds celebration parties here today and there tomorrow. But when you actually check the list, you will find that there are many newspapers with inflated prices of more than 20, and even more than 30 everywhere.

It's all for face.

Coupled with the rise of online music, piracy has led to an extremely bad market environment. Hu Yanbing's actual sales so far have only reached 20 copies, which is already a huge success.

The entire physical record market is extremely depressed, and the dreams of countless musicians and people in the industry have been shattered.

At this time, the great music emperor Zhou Yi attempted to use his influence to save the suddenly collapsed record market. To this end, he did not hesitate to break the balance between art and commerce in his albums and engage in commercialization, just to give the record market a shot in the arm with his own strength.

You ask for evidence?

These 10 highly commercial songs are the evidence!

When have you ever seen Zhou Yi stuff so many commercial songs into one album?

Why would he do this if it wasn't to save the market?

He writes and sings like this to keep more people in the habit of buying records!
This is love! It is great love! So the theme of his songs is all love!

Sony is guilty of a heinous crime!

Zhou Yi's last stubbornness is to keep a few songs in the album that deeply integrate soul, R&B and other singing styles and have deep thoughts. If these songs become popular, Zhou Yi will return to the state of balancing art and business in the past.
If it didn't become popular, it would be because the country still lacked a mature music commercial market. Although Zhou Yi was very disappointed, he still tried to cultivate the domestic music commercial market, and for this reason he began to write more songs that were particularly popular.

No matter how many people believe it, this marketing has to be promoted anyway - after a few years, it will naturally be confirmed as a fact.

This marketing method is very classic and still has a large audience even in the era of mobile Internet.

The most typical example is Jay Chou——

Because the album "Bedtime Stories" was too commercialized and its quality further declined, the only hit song "Confession Balloon" was pulled out as a sacrifice to save face.

You can see this kind of rhetoric everywhere, including Weibo, Tik Tok, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili and other platforms: "In fact, Jay Chou was also surprised by the popularity of "Confession Balloon", because it was a commercial work he wrote casually, and no one cared about his other in-depth songs that he made with great care. He was disappointed, blah blah..."

In fact, it is pure nonsense, because no singer in this world can foresee whether his or her song will be a hit.

But you can see this kind of rhetoric on all platforms, and everyone is actively spreading it. The question is, if there are no internet trolls, how could Jay Chou need internet trolls?

As a result, passers-by also accepted Jay Chou's personality as a person disappointed with the Chinese music environment, and saved the reputation of his album.

But in fact, if there were no water army to set the direction of the public opinion, such a unified perception would not be formed on the entire platform, and there would not be such similar rhetoric.

"Bedtime Stories" has a total of 10 songs, but four of them are commercial songs from cooperating brands. Is this disappointment with the Chinese music environment?

It's noisy.

It’s not that the explosive popularity of “Confession Balloon” became a fig leaf to attract the attention of a large number of passers-by, but that this album’s underwear has to be stripped off.

If Jay Chou can clean up his commercialism in this way, there's no reason why Zhou Yi can't do the same. What's more, even if he has too many commercial songs, they are still extremely popular.

For the general public, Zhou Yi estimates that his album "Hush" might become the best-received album in the past five years.

When that time comes, no matter how commercial the quality of Zhou Yi's future albums becomes, as long as a certain high quality standard is maintained, this universal formula can be applied: it is all for the purpose of cultivating a good commercial market.

The physical record markets of China's 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities, 2 special administrative regions, and one Taiwan Province are all on Zhou Yi's shoulders!

He could even leave a prelude for his future farewell - by cooperating with the promotion after releasing the album, and occasionally saying something like "musicians need to work together to maintain the music market."

In that case, after several years of subtle influence, Zhou Yi finally withdrew because writing highly commercial albums could no longer save the market. Zhou Yi felt depressed and decided to bid farewell to the music scene in a dignified manner.

In the future mobile Internet era, when netizens are doing archaeology, they can secretly spread some information to set the tone, and the image of a tragic hero who sacrificed in the wheel of the times will come to life on paper.

Moreover, this tragic hero really meant it when he said he was going to quit the music industry.

As a result, netizens who are doing archaeology in the future will naturally come up with a question: If Zhou Yi didn't need to save the market, or if he didn't quit the music scene out of exhaustion, what heights could he have reached...

A world number one who was clearly at the peak of his powers had to retire due to the times, leaving behind an insurmountable figure and a future that made people wonder.

If there were no interference from the factors of the times, how powerful would a complete Zhouyi without any constraints be?

Precisely because we have never seen it, there is unlimited room for imagination.

(End of this chapter)